Keynote: The increasing divergence in performance

An excerpt from Ross Dawson’s keynote speech where he gives his insights into the trend of increasing divergence in performance of organizations.

Full Transcription: The increasing divergence in performance

Ross Dawson:

If we look at business, we look at what is changing
there is one big trend that overwhelms all others:
that is the divergence in performance of organizations.
We can see so much data pointing to the gap:
the gap between the best performing organizations
and the least-performing organizations continues to increase.
There is this divergence in performance.
And this is supported by for example this data
from Deloitte’s Center for the Edge in Silicon Valley
This top line shows the best quartile of
organizations in return on assets.
The bottom one is the lowest quartile.
The best performing organizations are consistently getting 11-13%,
and even during the Global Financial Crisis
the best performing organizations performed even better than at other times.
But the least performing organizations are consistently destroying value
If they continue to do what they do, they will erode, die, be taken over.
This is the divergence: the difference between these organizations
is between those that are watching the world change and staying static
Whereas the best-performing organizations are the ones that are
literally creating the future.
The ones that are seeing the changes as opportunities
to be able to reinvent themselves, to become new organizations,
to be able to seize the extraordinary opportunities that are happening.